Debian Weekly News - November 4th, 2003

Welcome to this year's 44th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Bruce Perens reserved
nonfree.org as a possible home for non-free if it ever spins off of Debian.
Currently it's just a CNAME to ftp.debian.org but with a little work it could
be a good facility to manage a non-free cut-over.

Debian faster than Gentoo? Matt Garman
wondered
why his C++ program ran dramatically slower when compiled on
a Gentoo machine than when compiled with Debian Sid. He later
reported
that recompiling the Gentoo C++ libraries with less
aggressive optimization flags (-O2 instead of -O3) eliminated
the speed difference. William Kenworthy added that
Debian and other distributions are conservative, but set up by very
experienced people.

System Recovery with Knoppix. IBM Developerworks has an article by Carla Schroder that describes how to rescue a non-booting Linux
system, edit files, mount networked filesystems, and do a bare-metal rebuild
with only a Knoppix disk and an
Internet connection.

Improving KDE Maintainership.
Some people may have been alarmed to see that many of the core KDE
packages were orphaned last week by Chris Cheney. Fortunately, this was
done to pave the way for the Qt/KDE Maintainers group of which Chris Cheney is
a member. A mailing list
for this group was created and a draft policy
document is being discussed.

Amendment of the Social Contract. Branden Robinson proposed to
amend the Social Contract. Some of his
amendments change the meaning of the Social Contract, whereas others are
only editorial. One of his key proposals is that Debian's commitment to a
non-free archive be deleted. This means that Debian would be free to stop
providing non-free software if it chose. The proposal was discussed on Slashdot, where Bruce Perens suggestedhow removing non-free might work. The proposal would also make the Social
Contract a bit separate from the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

Debian in the Enterprise? James Maguire wondered if there
is a place for Debian in the enterprise world. He talks about certification
or rather the lack of and missing vendor support which is compensated by third
party support from different companies. Use of Debian depends on the
requirements of the end user. If they were technically self supporting, and
they don't want to pay a different vendor, they could deploy Debian -- and it
would lead to greater return on investment.

Draft Position Statement regarding GNU FDL. Manoj
Srivastava reported about the effort writing a document that attempts to address some
concerns that members of the Debian project have about the GNU Free Documentation License
(FDL). This document attempts to present the reasoning behind the conclusion that the
GNU FDL is not regarded as a license that can easily satisfy the Debian Free Software
Guidelines.

Constitutional Amendment Results. Proposal A in the vote to disambiguate Constitution section 4.1.5 succeeded
over the other options. This means that the Debian Social Contract and Debian Free Software
Guidelines are now "Foundation Documents", and may be modified by a
3:1 majority of Developers. The amendment also clarified the status of
non-technical documents, ensuring that Developers may issue, supersede and
withdraw various statements, including position statements about issues of
the day.

Debconf Templates Style Guide. Christian Perrier announced a
style guide for writing debconf templates.
During his work translating debconf templates to French, Christian often
found templates which seemed to be inconsistent with some written or
unwritten rules. It became evident that some formalisation of writing rules
and recommendations could help package maintainers to prepare "well-written"
debconf templates. General style harmonisation could also greatly improve
the perception of Debian, giving it a more "professional" presentation.

NetBSD Status Report. Joel Baker posted
a NetBSD status report. Joel will be restarting the archive using debpool
(which should handle uploads via HTTPS PUT, without needing logins on the box
itself). The archive will be based on -current again (aka, pre-2.0), since
he has run into problems which can only be resolved by having working POSIX
Thread support. He is also continuing to work on the 4-to-3-clause BSD
license conversion, with the permission of the NetBSD Foundation (contacting
authors and asking them to relicense, submitting patches, and working with
the Core team to get them integrated cleanly). So far, this has been
dramatically successful.

Getting HP Hardware supported for Debian. Kianusch Sayah
Karadji is trying to convince HP to add Debian
support to their hardware. HP claims, that since Debian has no figures on how
many users it has on HP servers, they do not know if supporting Debian would
make sense. If you do, please get in touch with Kianusch at
debian@sk-tech.net. Several HP employees are members
of the Debian development community.

Tasksel and custom Debian Distributions. Andreas Tille wondered
how tasksel is supposed to support custom Debian distributions such as Debian Jr. or Debian-Med. Currently tasksel displays
the debian-jr task but ignores the others. Of course, a more
sophisticated solution should be found to handle them equally.

Multiple PostgreSQL Packages. Oliver Elphick pondered
whether and how to have multiple versions of the PostgreSQL packages installed at once. This is to get round problems with upgrading major
versions, and to allow people to have multiple database clusters, possibly at
different software versions.

Debian Project at COMDEX. There'll be a Debian installation
festival
at this year's Comdex in Las
Vegas on Thursday, November 20th, from 12:00pm to 1:30pm. Everybody is
welcome to help or be helped. Also at Comdex, in the "Open Source and Linux
Innovation Center", on Tuesday 18th from 1:30pm to 2:00pm a half hour talk
introduces Debian to corporate users and, in the Open Source conference track,
on Wednesday 19th from 3:30pm to 4:45pm a discussion panel titled "A Practical Guide to Open Source Operating
Systems" will include Debian.

Alternative Postscript- and PDF-Viewer. Matthias Urlichs
noticed
that there are virtual packages for postscript-viewer and pdf-viewer, but no
alternatives, i.e. there's no /usr/bin/postscript-viewer. Mark
Brown explained that Debian uses a MIME handler registration system which viewer
programs should be making use of. The run-mailcap program can
be used to find an appropriate program for a given MIME type.

Localised Bug Reports. Magosányi Arpád wondered if
there is a known or planned way to report bugs to the Debian Bug Tracking
System in a non-english language. He proposed that if a non-english language
is detected, the bug report is sent to a language package instead the real
package. The maintainers of the language package would then mediate the
communication between the user and the package maintainer.

Request for a Debian Kernels List. Francesco Paolo
Lovergine proposed to create a new mailing list debian-kernels in order to ease the
coordination and maintenance of kernels and patches in Debian. This list
would not be limited to Linux kernels but also include Hurd and *BSD. He also
requested the list to be
created.

Circular Build Dependencies. Anthony DeRobertis wondered if
he is the only one who believed that one could build Debian from source,
starting with only essential and build-essential packages. In particular he
stomped over the cdbs - libgd-gd2-*-perl - cdbs chain. Joel Baker would like to see
Debian main in stable and testing as closed sets in terms of
build-dependencies. The current situation is a pain for porters to a new
architecture or kernel.

Split Kernel Header Files. Otto Wyss wondered
why libc6-dev suddenly
depended on linux-kernel-headers. Mark Brown explained
that there have always been some kernel headers included in libc6-dev. They
have just been split out into a separate package now. Several of these
headers are referenced by headers provided by glibc which would break those
headers if linux-kernel-headers is not installed.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 9 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 190 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this
newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian
community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how
to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at dwn@debian.org.